Mozilla IT & Operations

IT goings-on

First off, some good news for those of you that felt the 3-month rotation for LDAP passwords was too short: most accounts have now moved to a 6-month rotation period. Of course, all that really means is that in a given year, one is merely 50% less likely to get locked out after having forgotten to change their password. Fortunately, resets of locked accounts are now totally self-service, so getting locked out is now much less irritating at is used to be.

Speaking of improving end-user experience, NetOps did some work on the wireless networks in both Paris and Taipei, moving them into larger configuration groups so as to standardise their configurations. They are now easier to manage, and thus, easier to diagnose and optimise.

On the graphing and visualisation front, a big shout-out to Ali and Anurag from the Metrics team, who have been hard at work on implementing a new visualisation tool, an example of which can be seen here. Their new self-service framework allows the rest of us to quickly generate graphs and dashboards for just about anything we might be interested in. In addition, Ben Sullins has been hard at work on implementing Tableau to help people build tools for analysing and displaying data, which Jacques Uber from WebOps has used to set up a hardware warranty summary graph, which has already helped us to better understand and plan for upcoming expiration dates across thousands of machines.

On the topic of machines, the Storage and Virtualisation team spent the better part of a week braving the noise, temperature, and glaring fluorescent lights of the data centre during their push to expand our back-end NetApp infrastructure. Thanks to their efforts, we now have room for some 300 additional virtual machines, which is going to give use some much-needed breathing room in that area. This is going to be a big help going forward as we decommission those aforementioned out-of-warranty machines and replace them with spiffy new VMs.

As always, if you have any questions or want to learn more, feel free to comment below or hop on to #it on irc.mozilla.org. See you next time!